Research

The GLRC focuses its research agenda around four major themes:

1. Work, Employment & Labour Rights

The theme of ‘Work, Employment, and Labour Rights’ brings together faculty and students with research interests in the areas of labour market regulation, labour law, labour market policy, and human rights in the workplace. With attention to the impact of the changing nature of work and employment on labour rights, this research theme concentrates research initiatives around the study of labour rights at local, national, international, and transnational scales with particular attention to processes of gendering and racialization.

2. Migration, Citizenship, and Work

With growing international and intra-national movements of some and constraints on the movement of others, as well as increased capital mobility linked to new regimes of trade and investment, patterns of work and employment connect increasingly to citizenship and migration studies. In response to this burgeoning area of research, the theme of ‘Migration, Citizenship, and Work’ brings together faculty and students with research interests in the areas of internal and international migration and work and employment studies, particularly those with research orientations attuned to processes of racialization and gendering, and to politics of social justice and equity.

3.Gender Relations in Work and Labour Movements

One of York’s internationally recognized strengths is in the field of feminist political economy. A large number of faculty identify with this tradition, and the study of work and gender relations takes place across disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields such as Women’s & Sexuality Studies, History, Geography, Environmental Studies, Law, Political Science, Sociology, Work & Labour Studies, Development Studies, Human Resource Management, Organizational Behavior, and Health Studies. This theme is oriented toward exploring gender relations in paid and unpaid work, as well as within labour movements.

4. Revitalization of Workers’ Movements

This theme builds upon York’s strength as home for a number of leading scholars of labour and social justice movements, both in Canada and internationally. Research within this theme addresses the question of how workers and other groups subject to economic and social injustice can build their capacities to foster progressive, equitable, and democratic social transformation. With a broad/holistic conceptualization of the labour movement, this theme encompasses trade unions as well as other forms of worker organizing.

5. Work and Health

Bridging interdisciplinary research in both the study of work and the study of health, this theme brings together researchers with expertise in the multiple interconnections between the workplace, health, and healthcare. Research in Work and Health encompasses the study of the health impacts of work and work reorganization, the organization of health care work including both paid and unpaid care labour, transnational migration and care labour, and worker organizing in health sector workplaces.

Upcoming Events

The Global Labour Research Centre is pleased to announce its upcoming third annual International Graduate Student Symposium, to be held at York University on February 21-22, 2019. The Symposium will showcase research by emerging scholars…

The Global Labour Research Centre and CERLAC are pleased to host Labour and Development Strategies in the Global South: How labour relations moulded new developmentalism in Argentina and authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey with Dr. Sumercan…